A key requirement to a strong and effective eCommerce presence is Onsite Search. Often overlooked, onsite search is essential to a positive user experience and to driving increased revenue.

Too many eCommerce sites force customers to search for what they want by having to browse poorly constructed product catalogs. According to eConsultancy, nearly 84% of companies don’t actively optimize or measure their onsite search. Now given many of those same companies spend time optimizing their eCommerce sites for external search engines, not optimizing for onsite search is a missed opportunity.

Why is onsite search important? According to eConsultancy and ConversionXL:

• 30% of eCommerce site visitors will use onsite search, making it one of the most popular areas of your website
• People who perform onsite search are twice as likely to purchase because they have intent

And providing your customers with a strong onsite search tool improves leads to:

• Improved customer retention and loyalty
• Improved user experience
• Increased site usage

So we’ve established that onsite search is an critical element of your eCommerce solution. Let’s look at how commercebuild can help you improve the online experience for your customers and drive incremental revenue for your business.

Out of the box, commercebuild provides a powerful onsite search engine – Elasticsearch. As an open source search engine, Elasticsearch is fast, easily scalable and very flexible. That’s why we built it into the commercebuild platform. Some of the cool capabilities of onsite search you get with commercebuild include:

Faceted Navigation

With commercebuild, not only can you filter options by category, you can also filter the search results.

So you get accurate searching and also dynamic product category and product filters to further enhance the search results. And as discussed in this post, the better the search results the more likely your customers are going to buy. The facets are automatically built according to the search results, including:

• Category
• Stock
• Brand

+ all the custom filters you have created/wish to create

Sorting

Products in search results are sorted based on relevancy by default, which is all determined by the Elasticsearch algorithm. But products can also be sorted based on item code, description, or price, improving the accuracy of search results for your customers.

What are the benefits?

Enhanced onsite search is a powerful way for your customers to easily navigate to what they need. Matching the right customers with the right products is a proven formula for online success. It means you’ll never miss a sale as a result of customers abandoning their search due to the frustration of not finding what they want. And coupling onsite with related items functionality is an effective way to increase your average order value.

Want to improve the online experience for your customers? Contact [email protected] to set up a demo. We’d love to help!